Previously, he had replaced the chip in an Atari cartridge with an EEPROM that he could reprogram via a ribbon cable. This new iteration places that EEPROM inside the case of the gaming console along with a PIC development board. The PIC board interfaces an SD card with somewhere around 1200 ROMs on it. Three switches added to the front of the Atari allow the user to cycle through available games and flash the desired title to the EEPROM. As you can see, a 2×16 LCD display now resides in the cartridge opening.
This seems a little more eloquent (and less legal) than the Super Genintari.
[Sydney] sent in this fantastic portable Dreamcast, built by [techknott], in response to the one we posted yesterday. While we agree, this one is much more polished, we want to point out why the post yesterday is more Hack A Day material. Sure, it looks more “hackish”, but that’s not what we are referring to. What we want to draw your attention to, is the lack of information. Yesterday, there was a build log. Today, there is not. Sure the other one could have had much much more information and we’re not commenting on which one is “better”. We’re just reminding you to please please please document your projects. Oh, and also, this thing is awesome.
Yesterday, iFixit.com announced that they are releasing all of their manuals under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The site has long been an abundant source of tear-down photos for hardware and has been gaining momentum as the go-to source for Apple hardware repair information. With the move to Creative Commons, the gates are open to distribute and improve upon the site’s content. There are even plans in the works to host user-submitted improvements (something akin to a wiki?) to the guides but there are not yet any details. The news also includes mention of forthcoming support for translated guides around the end of 2010.
The Hackaday crowd would rather fix things than throw them away. As iFixit moves past Apple products to a wider range of repair manuals and starts working collaboratively with users, we hope to see an explosion of detailed tips, tricks, and guides to keep our stuff working better, longer.
Here’s a Christmas tree project we can get behind. The “tree” itself is made of twisted pairs of insulated copper wire. At the end of each pair a surface mount LED has been soldered between the two conductors. All of the wire limbs converge into a 4×4 matrix. One tree uses a prototyping shield and an Arduino, the other tree is just using an ATtiny2313 microprocessor. Take a look at the twinkling tree in the video after the break.
This artful creation uses one color of LEDs. We’d love to see future improvements that incorporate multiple colors, enhance the fading effects, and perhaps add some interactivity such as pulsing to an inspiring rendition of Chestnuts Roasting on and Open Fire (which, consequently, is called “The Christmas Song“).
[Patrick] directed us to his project for alternate realism. The final goal is to be able to walk around in a space wearing a head mounted display, exploring a virtual representation of that space. This virtual representation could be altered, stylized, augmented and modified in countless ways. It is an exploration in perception, similar to enjoying different styles of painting, we could enjoy different styles of viewing a real space. Currently, it isn’t quite real time. He has to scan a room with a somewhat bulky device, then plug into his display to explore it. Being able to scan quickly and reliably enough shouldn’t be far off. [Patrick] notes that others have done almost real time scans at home already.
If you’ve ever had a car with an electrical system problem you know how hard it can be to pin-point the source of your woes. Here’s a hackery solution that uses a diy PCB to monitor the current being drawn off of the alternator.The sensing is provided by an Allegro ACS758 integrated circuit. This chip measures current up to 150A and outputs an analog signal that can be measured by a microcontroller. In this case an AVR ATmega8 measures the signal and spits the info back to a PC via the serial port. This data can be graphed to help locate when too much current is being drawn for the battery to remain charged.
What looks like an absolute mess of wires,5 fans,3 batteries, and other miscellaneous equipment squeezed into a Tupperware box on the left? At first we didn’t believe it, but it is actually [John's] fully functioning slick-looking portable Dreamcast on the right. The system runs Quake 3 for a little over 2 hours, not too bad considering it is also powering a VMU, rumble pad, 5 inch LCD screen, and did we mention 5 fans! All in all, it’s still smaller than the original Xbox controller, and we like that one of the greatest consoles is getting some well deserved respect. Check out the work log and a video of it functioning after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you find that beer pong is too dull on its own to keep your attention? Do you require flashing lights to accentuate your imbibing? Here’s the perfect solution. Make an interactive beer pong table. It didn’t take much to sell us on the idea. We think everything needs a few more lights.
The idea is that as the game progresses, you get different feedback from the lights visible in the picture above. [rohitk] is using an Arduino and some pressure sensors to tell when each cup is removed. Based on this the LEDs change color.
After [Gregg Benjamin] read our story about a simple physical email notifier, he decided to test his skills and add some touches of his own. Rather than limiting his notifier to just email, he has added support for displaying Pandora Radio songs, Facebook notifications, and email all to a LCD. He even has included code for an optional motion detector, as well as support for text message notification. We always love it when our stories inspire our readers to bring their own various solutions to similar problems, so we hope some of you take the code he has supplied (written in python for desktop side, and Arduino sketches for the microcontroller side) and add support for your own interests. Might we suggest RSS feed support, or other social media such as reddit or Google Reader? Let us know if you add something cool, and we might do a follow-up!
[Gregg] doesn’t have a blog of his own, so we have posted the demo video to YouTube, and he has provided all of his related code and images to Megaupload (warning, file is ~115 MB). Sorry to anyone looking for a blog link.
Sometimes, prototyping systems need to be robust, full-featured, and powerful. Other times, nostalgia and simplicity are much more appealing. Rather than buying a pre-made prototyping board, one of our readers grabbed some parts lying around, including an Atmega8, a SMD 16Mhz oscillator, and a 6 pin ISP header, and performed some circuit origami free-form soldering (thanks [Gilberti]!). After it was assembled, he realized that it fit in a hollowed out 2×6 Lego brick rather easily. After adding female headers to the pins, as well as a label and some hot glue to seal it up, he was left with a fully functional, and most likely very durable centerpiece to a project. We would love to see this worked into a Lego Mindstorm robot, just for the sake of fitting in.
Do you find that beer pong is too dull on its own to keep your attention? Do you require flashing lights to accentuate your imbibing? Here’s the perfect solution. 
